The religious persecution that intensified the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo in the first days of April has led to at least 20 Nicaraguans being arrested, especially during Holy Week, when the police banned processions and Catholic traditions. Data on the arrests came from opposition organizations, which classified them as “kidnappings” and recorded the sieges of parishes and the performance of intra-church rites in temples.
The Blue and White Monitoring Organization reports 35 incidents of human rights abuses during Holy Week, one of the most revered and most noticed by Catholicism. These include five incidents of police harassment and nine incidents of area checks by officials to boycott the processions. They also highlight the expulsion from the country of the Panamanian priest Donaciano Alarcón. The priest was arrested and left barefoot by the immigration authorities at the border with Honduras for pleading for the release of Bishop Rolando Álvarez, who was sentenced to 26 years in prison.
“Events of note include three incidents and the arrest of a journalist. At least nine arrests of parishioners who attended Holy Week celebrations,” reveals blue-and-white surveillance. The journalist arrested is Víctor Ticay, a contributor to Channel 10, an open signal who reported on the tradition of La Reseña in the Nandaime municipality of southern Nicaragua. The religious event became relevant because the devotees bypassed the officials’ fence. Ticay posted everything on his Facebook page and was arrested for it. Then the video he sent was deleted from his social page.
The Organization of Independent Journalists and Communicators of Nicaragua (PCIN) condemned the journalist’s “arbitrary and unlawful” detention and affirmed that he was transferred to the Directorate of Legal Aid, El Chipote, in Managua. So far, however, the police have not reported the arrest.
The Ortega y Murillo regime banned the Stations of the Cross during Lent from mid-February and later extended the restriction to all Easter events. The Catholic hierarchy in Nicaragua complied with the order announced by the police and canceled the traditional national pilgrimages before Holy Week. The parish priests ordered their faithful to perform their acts of faith in the temples, but this did not prevent police harassment from abating.
But it was not only in the city of Nandaime that the devotees rebelled: in the departments of Masaya, Granada and Chinandega, young men in robes and with crosses defied the officials by reenacting the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus in the streets. In the small and hot community of Ranchería in the west of the country, believers protested against the riot police and surrounded the police patrol and demanded the ban on the traditional departure of Jews.
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Such was the persecution that Pope Francis, in his Easter message at Easter Sunday Mass, mentioned Nicaragua during his traditional blessing “urbi et orbi” (“to the city and to the world”). Referring to the conflicts affecting the planet, the Pope prayed for all who are prevented from freely and publicly professing their faith. “Support, Lord, the Christian communities that celebrate Easter today in special circumstances, as in Nicaragua and Eritrea, and remember all those who are prevented from freely and publicly professing their faith,” he pleaded.
Religious persecution included the closure of Catholic media outlets, the expulsion of priests and nuns, and the unilateral severing of diplomatic ties with the Holy See after Francis branded the Ortega y Murillo regime a Hitler dictatorship.
April, hot month
The Urnas Abiertas organization claimed that religious persecution during Holy Week brought even more intimidation and the siege covered almost the entire country. The organization expects the harassment in Nicaragua to continue throughout April, particularly from the 18th when the fifth anniversary of the social protests that cornered the presidential couple is celebrated.
Since 2018, the regime doubled down on the police state in April to avoid any kind of commemoration or allusion to the popular movement, which was mollified with deadly force by police and Sandinista paramilitaries. At least 355 people were executed, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Thousands have been arrested and hundreds convicted in political trials, while to date some 300,000 Nicaraguans have fled political violence and the economic crisis or have gone into exile, in an unprecedented exodus comparable only to that of the 1980s, when the country collapsed into a Civil war was overthrown war.
Recently, the report of the Expert Group on Human Rights on Nicaragua (Ghren, for its English acronym) concluded that Ortega and Murillo were responsible for the commission of crimes against humanity from 2018 to date. Experts have urged the international community to activate international justice against the presidential couple, while Ghren’s mandate has been renewed by the United Nations to deepen repressive chains of command, including an investigation into the role played by the Nicaraguan army.
In exile in Miami, the Auxiliary Bishop of Managua, Silvio Báez, celebrated the Resurrection Mass, recalling that Jesus had removed the stones from the tomb. “On the way to their liberation, the peoples are blocked not only by the mighty stones of tyrants’ cruelty, but also by the stones of the indifference of the egoists, the envy of the leaders, and the hopelessness of the people they are weary of suffering. . But all these stones can be removed,” the prelate encouraged.
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